Divest Day 8 of 21: From Waste to Conservation

There’s no denying it: we live in a culture of waste here in the U.S. Our war economy extracts resources from the earth and dumps them into a giant hole in the ground, while bombarding us with messages to mindlessly buy more and more with little regard to whether we actually need the things we purchase or not.

We waste $1 trillion of food every year and consume 1 million plastic bags every minute, and you’re probably well aware of the consequences for our planet and the people exploited in the process. A finite planet simply cannot accommodate infinite growth, and we’re fast approaching the tipping point.

Like we’ve discussed in earlier days, the war economy tricks us into believing our personal actions won’t make an impact on problems of such magnitude. That what we do won’t possibly matter in the grand scheme of things. But as we’ve seen throughout history, the action we make locally catalyzes change that spreads further and more deeply than we can imagine. Getting to zero-waste isn’t a dream, but a future we can work towards every day.